Viva la Difference

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

 

One might suppose that readers of horror fiction and viewers of horror films would be difficult to offend about much of anything. Such is not the case--or not always, anyway. This article is not intended to offend, and, hopefully, it won’t offend. That having been said, please, if you are easily offended, do not read this post. Otherwise, duly warned, proceed at your own risk. The subject matter of horror fiction is simple and familiar, for the most part: demons, ghosts, monsters, vampires, werewolves, witches, zombies, and the like. However, these bogeymen are exhausted, sooner or later, as villains who are both (a) villainous and (b) scary. How many times can readers or audiences be expected to shriek at the same, tired menace? After a few hundred demons or ghosts, they’re really not all that menacing. Therefore, writers, being a creative sort, seek other means than just the monster of the week, so to speak, to horrify and terrify their fans. For Dean Koontz, the solution has been to cross-pollinate horror with most of the other popular genres of fiction to create a sort of hydra-headed hybrid of narrative that is part action-adventure, part comedy, part mystery, part science fiction, and part romance--and, oh, yes, part horror story. And there has to be an almost-human dog, with or without psychic powers. (Hey, it works for him.) For Stephen King, the trick seems to be to investigate the psychology and the sociology of small-town life, exposing the pale underbelly of apparent goodwill and friendliness that, in the final analysis, goes only skin deep and doesn’t usually apply to strangers, who’d be best advised to keep moving and pass through without stopping. For Bentley Little, everything is a matter of creating eerie atmospheres and seasoning the whole bizarre stew with plenty of spicy forbidden sex. Another trick, less often used and, therefore, perhaps more effective in some ways than the tried and the true approaches to energizing horror’s menaces is a technique that I like to call viva la difference because it’s French and it sounds good. (Really, it’s because it identifies the technique.) This approach is simply this: make some element of the narrative different than it is normally. Step outside the norm, and deliver, in one detail, the unusual. The Alien series does this with reproduction. Men and women are bypassed as the vehicles for dissemination and conception, to be replaced with the so-called face-hugger (also known as a xenomorph) (Wikipedia) describes the critter’s “life cycle” as horrifically as any other source:

Their life cycle comprises several distinct stages: they begin their lives as an egg, which hatches a parasitic larval form known as a face-hugger, which then attaches itself to a living host by, as its name suggests, latching onto its face. The face-hugger then “impregnates” the host with an embryo known as a chest-burster, which, after a gestation period of several hours, erupts violently from the host’s chest resulting in the death of the host. The chest-burster then matures to an adult phase within a few hours, shedding its skin and replacing its cells with polarized silicon. Due to the transfer of DNA during the gestation period, the alien also takes on some of the basic physical attributes of the host from which it was born.

Not surprisingly, women have seen more than a bit of misogyny in this image of reproduction. However, something similar occurred much earlier in the notions of the succubus, a demon who assumes a womanly form to rape men during their sleep (the male counterpart was the incubus) and in reports, made (perhaps under torture) by suspected witches, in which sexual intercourse with the devil is not only described as a painful experience, but his seed is also characterized as ice cold. These are examples, sexual in nature, of the application of viva la difference to horror threats: a difference in one or two details (casting reproduction as a parasitic rape of sorts or representing semen as a substance as freezing as it is fertile) of a larger process, sequence, or situation is introduced, thereby making the whole event seem all the more horrible, since, otherwise, it remains much the same (that is, unchanged). This technique is a micro-level adaptation of what horror stories routinely do on a larger level. In many horror stories, everything is as it should be (or, at least, as it usually is) at the beginning of the narrative or drama. However, before long, something slightly out of kilter takes place. Then, something else uncanny (or, at least, unsettling) occurs. And then something else, worse, and so on, until it becomes clear, even to the most inattentive protagonist that something unnatural or otherworldly is happening. Instead of making something bizarre happen at the level of the community, the region, the nation, or the world, viva la difference makes something strange take place at a much smaller and more localized level, such as in the “life cycle” of a species or even at the microscopic or cellular level (semen is cold, like ice, instead of body temperature, as normally it is--and should be). The difference need not relate to sex, of course. The difference might be the appearance of a ghostly figure in a photograph, especially one that was not present--as far as anyone could see--when the picture was taken. Usually, such differences should be subtle, although I recall being spooked by the description of one man’s look of abject terror in a family portrait in which the others all looked serenely normal, and the addition, in The Shining, of Jack Torrance’s image to a much earlier photograph on display in the Overlook Hotel is quite eerie and frightening. Viva la difference does not have to be objective. Maybe the difference that is introduced is entirely subjective. In flipping through an album of mounted family photographs, for instance, maybe it’s only Aunt Millie who sees corpses where everyone else sees Uncle Joe and Cousin Betty. So, what have we learned today? To effect horror and, possibly, disgust, manipulate a detail or two in a normal or natural process, series, or situation so that it (or they) are made bizarre without otherwise distorting the process, series, or situation as a whole. In short, remember that a birth is neither horrible nor repulsive, but a birth defect can be both.

Cunning Devices: Plot as Invention

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

In “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences,” Mark Twain observes that the author of the Leatherstocking series lacks inventiveness:

Cooper’s gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment; but such as it as he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box of stage-properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go.

(For Twain‘s own “rules governing literary art,” refer to “Mark Twain’s ’Rules For Governing Literary Art”). The analogy in which a narrative plot is compared to an invention is fruitful as an aid in understanding the plotting of fiction. Many patents are issued not for original inventions but for improvements to them. For example, the original mousetrap could be patented, but so could a better mousetrap. This fact suggests something analogous in regard to fiction. To devise an original plot for oneself, a writer can adapt the plot of another writer. But, wait! Isn't that plagiarism? It could, but need not, be. Huh? Let me explain. To steal another writer’s plot is definitely plagiarism, but ideas cannot be patented. Therefore, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, and Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, among many others, which all feature dinosaurs, are acceptable (that is, legal). If more than one writer has succeeded with a particular type of monster (dinosaurs, for instance), you might do likewise, provided that you use only the idea of dinosaurs as your monsters and not the specific treatments of dinosaurs that others have employed. Here’s a way to go about the business of “improving” upon (or tinkering with) the plots of others so as to produce a story idea of one’s own. Consider the original in terms of its categories or elements: character, setting, theme, conflict, plot. Can you think of a twist on any (or more) of them? In the 1932 film version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a scientist, Henry Frankenstein, creates a monster from parts of human cadavers which he electrifies in his laboratory. (In the novel, it is unclear how the protagonist, medical student Victor Frankenstein, animates his monster, although a chemical [or alchemical] means is suggested.) The film version departs from the novel in these, and other, ways, but Shelley’s novel could also have suggested H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau. Wells’ setting is an island laboratory. Instead of human cadavers, human-animal hybrids are the mad scientist’s raw materials, and Dr. Moreau uses vivisection, rather than chemistry or electricity, to accomplish his wonders. Although it is debatable whether Shelley’s novel suggested The Island of Dr. Moreau, these sorts of innovations do represent the kind of adaptations to the plot of another, earlier work of which I speak. Thinking of plots as inventions also suggests a caution. Twain was a great writer, but a poor investor, and he lost a fortune in his investments in the James W. Paige’s “compositor,” a typesetting machine which boasted 18,000 parts! Sadder but much wiser, the author gave up “speculating” as a means of getting rich (or richer) quick and recouped his fortune by returning to what he did best: writing and reading his literary works to paying audiences. The moral of the story? To a degree, complexity in a story, especially a novel-length narrative, is a good thing. Readers want twists and turns in their stories. However, a plot that is more labyrinth than zigzag is apt to lose the reader. After all, one typically has only so many hours or days that he or she is willing to devote to the reading of a novel. If readers complain of, rather than praise, the length of a story, as even Stephen King’s most ardent “constant readers” are wont to do on occasion, their grievances may suggest more maze than meander.

What Constitutes Horror?

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

What constitutes horror? The answer is both simple and complex.

To understand the meaning of a word, it helps to know its origin. Originally, words usually have simple meanings which relate either to the body or to the world at large. It is only through repeated usage and adaptation of meaning that they develop more complex significance.

According to Online Etymology Dictionary (a great resource for writers), “horror” made its debut in the fourteenth century, from Old French horreur, meaning “bristling, roughness, shaking, trembling.” In other words, it referred to the standing of hair on end and to the shuddering of the body, not from cold, one may surmise, but from fear--to the physiological manifestations of terror.

It is similar, the Dictionary suggests, to the Sanskrit word harsate (“bristles”), to the Avestan term zarshayamna (“ruffling one’s feathers”), to the Latin noun eris (“hedgehog”), and to the Welsh word garw (“rough”). The Latin word horrifus (“horrific”), the same source informs its readers, means “terrible, dreadful,” or literally “making the hair stand on end,” and the Latin adjective horrendous, likewise, means “to bristle with fear” and to “shudder.”

Scientists tell us that animals make themselves as big as they can by assuming an erect posture, rearing upon their hind legs, and raising their forelegs; by bristling their fur or quills; ruffling their feathers; or, in the case of frogs, for example, puffing up. These physiological responses to a perceived threat are intended to intimidate and warn. They are protective postures. People have similar responses: their hair stands on end. They swell their chests and raise their arms.
They glower. Perhaps they will even display their teeth in a snarl.

Horror fiction concerns both the physiological effects of fear: the standing of hair on end, an increased heart rate, hyperventilation, the widening of the eyes and the gaping of the mouth, and so forth, and the objects of fear--that is, the causes of such physiological responses. The horror writer, in fact, brings the two together in a cause-and-effect relationship: the appearance of the monster (or the monstrous) causes the standing of hair on end, an increased heart rate, hyperventilation, the widening of the eyes and the gaping of the mouth, and so forth. In a nutshell, horror writers use words to create pictures and situations that produce a fight-or-flight response in their readers.

How writers perform this amazing feat is the complex part, but it is answered, more or less, in many of the articles I have already posted on Chillers and Thrillers, and, no doubt, it is an issue that I will continue to revisit and update.

Horror Story Failures

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

When one analyzes the cause of the failure of a horror story, one realizes, in short order, that the failure usually results from an inept handing of one (or more) of the basic elements of fiction, such as action, character, or theme, or from artistic self-indulgence.

M. Night Shyamalan’s recent film, The Happening (2008), is a good study in all of the following failures, any one of which could be sufficient, of itself, in some cases, to kill a film. With all these problems in the same piece of, uh, work, it would be truly astonishing if the horror film managed to survive its own debut let alone actually frighten anyone. Mercifully, it was stillborn.

The Happening fails because of its:

• Lack of compelling action
• Unsympathetic characters
• Clunky dialogue
• Unbelievable monster
• Obtuse theme
• Artistic self-indulgence

Let’s consider these items point by point, for there is something to be learned from artistic failure, just as there is something--much, in fact--to be learned from artistic success.

Lack of Action

The Happening doesn’t happen. That is, there is no action--or, rather, during the occasions that actors and properties are in motion, there isn’t any interest in, or suspense concerning, what is (allegedly) happening, partly because we don’t really give a fig what happens to the wooden characters who are supposed to be our hero and our heroine (a problem which we will consider in the next section of this post).

Unsympathetic Characters

To be of interest to an audience, the main character and those about whom he or she cares and to whom he or she is in some way related must be sympathetic. By “sympathetic,” I don’t mean kind and considerate (at least not necessarily), but understandable and believable. We have to know where they’re coming from, where they’re headed, and why. We have to know enough about them to say to ourselves, I may not agree with your perspective or your goals, but I understand both you and what you want to accomplish; you seem like a true-to-life individual with hopes and pain and plans. The Happening’s characters are none of the above.

Clunky Dialogue

Dialogue should sound natural. It should be a good imitation of the way that real, flesh-and-blood people actually talk, and it should mirror the inner worlds of the individuals who speak it. In short, it should be realistic. The dialogue in The Happening is clunky at best, absurd at worst, and destroys verisimilitude in either case.

Unbelievable Monster

Shyamalan asks his audience to believe that plants are mad as hell and refuse to take any more of humanity’s environmental abuses.

Really.

Obtuse Theme

What’s this movie about? It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature? We've only ourselves to blame for greenery’s coming curse? What happens in America is sure to happen elsewhere, too, especially in France? Current events in science can make money for filmmakers as well as scientists? Global warming may not be that big a deal, after all? Killer bees are the least of our problems? It doesn’t matter what kind of garbage a director delivers if he is selling his name instead of his art?

After spending ten bucks and a couple hours of one’s lifetime, a moviegoer expects to learn, or be reminded of, something worthwhile. Again, The Happening doesn’t deliver.

Artistic Self-Indulgence

Being a film director, even an auteur, doesn’t give anyone, least of all M. Night Shyamalan, the right to indulge his own personal and private takes on society, politics, or anything else--at least not without entertaining his audience first and foremost. Like the messianic Lady in Water (2006) (recipient of four Golden Raspberry Awards), this film is nothing more than a vehicle for narcissistic and sanctimonious self-indulgence.

With only two successful films, The Sixth Sense (1999) and Signs (2002), to his credit, Shyamalan's career is desperately near extinction, and one can only wonder how long it can continue while he himself is running on empty.